Rumelia

Etymology

In this context, Rûm means "Romans" and ėli means "land", hence Rumelia (Ottoman Turkish: روم ايلى, romanized: Rūm-ėli; Turkish: Rumeli) literally means “Land of the Romans” in Ottoman Turkish. The term referred to territories of the Ottoman Empire in Europe that had formerly belonged to the Byzantine Empire (the empire known to its own rulers and subjects as the Roman Empire), whose citizens styled themselves Rhomaioi ("Romans"). Although Greek became the predominant administrative and liturgical language, the empire was multiethnic and its Roman identity was civic and imperial rather than purely linguistic or ethnic.

In medieval Islamic and Ottoman usage, Rûm denoted the lands and peoples of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople, not the medieval Latin West. The Seljuks called Anatolia "the land of Rûm" after its gradual conquest from Byzantium following the Battle of Manzikert (1071). Their Anatolian polity was known to contemporaries as the Sultanate of Rum, meaning a sultanate established in the lands of the Romans; it was centred in central Anatolia until the defeat at the Battle of Köse Dağ (1243), after which it fragmented into the Anatolian beyliks.

With the Ottoman expansion across Anatolia and into the Balkans, and especially after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Rumeli came to apply primarily to the empire’s European provinces in the Balkans. The region remained largely Christian for centuries, while processes of Islamisation affected some populations, including Albanians, Bosniaks and certain communities among Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Vlachs.

The term "Roman" for the Byzantine polity also appears in Western sources. Latin documents, including those from Genoa, frequently used Romania as a name for the Byzantine Empire during the Middle Ages.

The name survives in several Balkan languages: Albanian: Rumelia; Bulgarian: Румелия, romanized: Rumeliya; Greek: Ρωμυλία, romanized: Romylía, and Ρούμελη, Roúmeli; Macedonian: Румелија, romanized: Rumelija; Serbo-Croatian: Румелија, Rumelija; and Romanian: Rumelia. Many grand viziers, viziers, pashas and beylerbeyis were of Rumelian origin.